The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [63]
Rose’s cheeks burned with angry shame, and she fumbled for the right words, pushing her lips into silent protestations.
“It’s her wedding, Mother,” Bean jumped in. “Besides, it’s not like she can wear your wedding dress. Cordy ruined it.”
“I did not,” Cordy objected. She dropped the brush back into the unexplored caverns of her bag, and our mother relaxed into her pillows again, Cordy curled beside her like a question mark.
“You spilled punch all over it at the prom.”
“I had it cleaned, dumb butt,” Cordy said. “You can’t even tell. Rose could wear it if she wanted to.”
Rose did not reply, but we all knew our mother’s swinging sixties minidress would be about as flattering on her as any of the hysterical poufs of fabric we had suffered through that morning. In any case, the subject had been changed, Cordy had been blamed, which was the way it ought to be, and at least nominal peace had been restored.
“Out, out, out,” a nurse shooed us, as she walked into the room, her crepe-soled shoes squeaking insistently against the floors. We outed, scooting around the portable toilet the nurse had rolled in with her. Standing in the hallway, Cordy went back to shredding her cuticles until Bean batted her hand away from her mouth. Cordy stuck out her tongue at Bean, and Rose shot them both a disapproving glance.
“When’s she coming home?” Rose asked our father, changing the focus from our disobedient sister.
Our father cleared his throat, stroked his beard with the hand not holding his place in his book. “Tomorrow, I know not whether God will have it so,” he said, as though he were lecturing to a particularly erudite class of undergraduates, which we suppose we are, in a way. “The hospital is sending a nurse to let us know what to do.” He looked somewhat confused by the idea, as though he were not sure what would possess them to do such a thing. Bean looked relieved. She was wearing high heels like railroad spikes, and elegantly loose trousers draped in a cunning camouflage over the Andreas family thighs. This was not a woman any of us could see acting as home health aide, least of all Bean herself.
“You should come home with us tonight, Daddy,” Bean said. “You look a mess.”
Our father shrugged. “Your mother and I haven’t spent a night apart since we were married, and I’m not about to start now. I’ll clean up in the bathroom.”
True, that. Our parents had married impossibly young, our father a fresh-faced master’s candidate, our mother a recent graduate, and possibly already pregnant (scandalous!). Our favorite photo of them shows them recessing down the aisle, the guests at the ceremony fashionably turned out in a blur of bobbing hats and elbow patches. Our father walks slightly ahead of our mother, whose veil trails out behind her in an invisible wind. He is smiling as though he has just won the jackpot. She is smiling as though she has discovered a secret.
In any case, even the night Rose was born, back in the days when men were not typically present in the delivery room, let alone acting as paramedical assistants in cutting the cord, and babies were dutifully welcomed into the world with a hearty slap on the rump to elicit an (unsurprisingly) objectioned reaction, our father slept in a chair much like the one we had found him in today, having insisted Rose’s bassinet be brought into the room. With one hand extended to clutch the plastic edge of the container, he slept happily through both mid-night feedings.
There is much made in the psychological literature of the effects of divorce on children, particularly as it comes to their own marriages, lo those many years later. We have always wondered why there is not more research done on the children of happy marriages. Our parents’ love is not some grand passion, there are no swoons of lust, no ball gowns and tuxedos, but here is